Elonera House
Winner, 2025 Dulux Colour Awards
Winner of Residential Interior at the 2025 Dulux Colour Awards, shortlisted at IDEA 2024, and published by The Local Project and est living. Studio Doherty, building design by Ari Alexander, built by our team.
Awards · Sandringham · 6 min read
In 2025, Elonera House won Residential Interior at the Dulux Colour Awards. Not shortlisted. Not commended. Won. The home was designed by Studio Doherty with building design by Ari Alexander, photographed by Sean Fennessy, and built by our team in Sandringham, completed September 2023.
There is an ethereal quality to Elonera House by Studio Doherty, a weightlessness and translucency that perfectly captures the goal to create a welcoming sanctuary from heritage beginnings. Judges' citation, 2025 Dulux Colour Awards
What the judges saw
The citation goes on to praise the precise placement, proportions and ratios of the palette, and closes on a line any builder would frame: the house has been exquisitely composed, with pitch-perfect tone, rhythm and dynamics. Colour that nuanced only reads when the surfaces beneath it are exact. Every wall dead flat, every junction resolved, every run of joinery sitting where the light expects it. The palette is the studio's. The surfaces are ours.
A home like the ones they grew up in
The brief was as human as they come. The clients wanted a home reminiscent of the houses of their childhoods in the 1970s, the kind where kids from the neighbourhood would pop in and stay all day. Over 700 square metres, that warmth is a discipline, not an accident.
A sense of weightlessness is achieved with extensive built-in joinery throughout the home, all raised from the floor allowing natural light to flow uninterrupted. est living
Shortlisted, published, then the win
Before the Dulux win, Elonera House was shortlisted for Residential Single at the 2024 Interior Design Excellence Awards, featured by The Local Project in July 2024, and published as an est living Home Tour. The IDEA entry described interiors transformed from rabbit warren to generously proportioned, with rooms full of restraint and refinement.
For our carpenters and joiners, the line the publications kept returning to was the joinery. Extensive built-in runs, all raised from the floor so light travels uninterrupted underneath. Cantilevers that read as effortless because the fixing behind them is anything but.
Preserve the charm, add the ease, and let the light run under everything. That was the job. The trophy suggests it landed.
Prolifica Building Co., Building Better Living